I think what we’re seeing here isnt Valve messing up but rather the middle east conflict expanded to cyberspace and spilling over to impact civilians. Look at the timing and affected countries. China isnt also exactly known for free internet.
WebRTC works as fallback. WebRTC is encrypted and cant be used for much else.
STUN in the otherhand is unencrypted and the protocol itself can be used for DDoS reflection/amplification. I would not be surprised if this is somehow weaponized and/or blocked/analyzed in real time that then breaks the connectivity.
I think you have that backwards, WebRTC doesn't work, and STUN does.
> impact regular people
I'm sure it was unintentional, but this phrase implies a pretty ugly sentiment
Regular people here are as opposed to military servicemen. The people who did not sign up for going to war.
These are dudes, likely some of them teenagers, playing Street Fighter and Tekken.
Who signed up for what?
The network shenanigans that apparently affect the p2p gaming is allegedly by the militaries of many countries, related to the Iran war. Much like GPS disturbancs in Northern and Eastern Europe are due to the war in Ukraine. Dudes delivering pizza have to suffer them, even though they never signed up to take part in the war.
> Who
These dudes and dudettes playing video games
> what?
Military service
Fair enough. Edited for clarity.
> impact regular people
aka civilians
I know I'm just preaching to the choir here but my favourite thing about open source/published source libraries/applications is discussions on bug reports/pr's like this.
It's just something so heartwarming of multiple people coming together to describe their symptoms, workarounds and theories of what could be causing it.
GitHub discussions used to be so much higher quality though when the platform was for professionals. Now, I see so many discussions that devolve into practically being reddit/4chan threads. Another reason to leave.
Only on those posted to social media including Hacker News. There is no devolving into memes for niche discussions only interested parties know about.
Don’t blame Github for getting spammed whenever an issue reaches the front page.
Not only. I see it across all of GitHub. Spam, +1 comments, feature begging are all particularly common.
I feel like it's gotten more professional. 10+ years ago people were dropping the hard R in pull request reviews, now everyone is acting like LinkedIn-speak and Stars will get them their next job
Wild hypothesising here on HN but if you read to the end of the GH issue users have been reporting that STUN has been failing (i.e. no P2P link establishment, fallback to high-latency relay servers.) Multiple users have been able to work around the issue by manually substituting older Valve WebRTC dlls. I'd love to read a postmortem from the Valve devs.
Title does not match GitHub issue: "Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other middle east countries"
The rabbit hole started as a major P2P issue in Israel and possibly other middle east countries and further investigations revealed it seems to be a worldwide problem.
Mmm im in China and played a third party game through steams Spacewar dev game (enabling steam p2p i think) like 3 weeks ago and it worked fine.
This is basically the plot to the movie Zone of Interest, which was inspired by modern day Israeli society.
We have kids complaining online about 40ms ping on their video games, and right down the kids are online complaining about how they're being hunted for sport.
Unnecessarily political. Israel children are not the one who are cheering the war, nor fighting in it.
Valve fascinates me because the devs there occasionally seem to be simply the best on earth in a given field, but despite that, bizarre bugs will persist for a long time. My favorite was how steam in home streaming from a PC to a steam deck wouldn't work if the steam deck had an Ethernet and wifi connection - one of the connections had to be disabled or the stream would always crash.
Maybe they need a few average devs there to spend time sweeping up behind the paragons that are pushing the envelope into these features existing at all.
My favorite bug family, that somehow to sneak in every time, is how their react frontend (or whatever the store runs) manages to semi-crash and the controller inputs are no longer recognized.
I kind of hope at least they'll fix such issues permanently before the steam machine release.
That is the bane of my existence. Steam's UI is so slow to react due to its web roots, that I feel like people must be insane to think that Steam is somehow this great app. It's terrible.
I shop on GOG.
Valve famously has a very flat org structure so it's possible that that problem just isn't sexy enough for someone to pick it up on their own, without being told by a higher-up.
I wish they offered remote; I'd happily work there doing those sorts of unglamorous bug fixes. High-reliability engineering is my jam.
People keep blaming the flat org, as if conventionally-organised companies never had any bugs or never focused on very visible and marketable features rather than bug fix.
In fact, the flat org allows a random person to work on a niche bug management doesn’t seem to care about, which wouldn’t be possible if you had a boss breathing down your neck.
They say they have a flat structure. People who have worked there, despite some axe-grinding, indicate otherwise.
grug tribal animal, tribe always there even when boss says is not
The title make it seems like it's broken everywhere...
interesting, people speculated that Street Fighter6 went from P2P to relay a few months ago on one of the updates. never wouldve thought it would be actually a valve issue
Is this a bug on Valve? Or is it simply a case of "My ISP is fucking with my internet traffic and they won't admit it please help me"
As SteamOS user for years i can say "typical Valve"
Hm, I have always wanted to use this to play couch co-op remotely but is this even the same "service" that provides that?
Looks like they tracked it to a steam update in March, and there's a workaround for at lest 3 games that involves all players copying steamwebrtc.dll to the game's ./binaries folder.
I blame Bricks and Minifigs
My unpopular opinion: Valve is basically a parasite or a landlord. They've been so successful it's hard to imagine a world without them, and they say "you gotta give the parasite its due" and we believe them and comply.
It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.
And their engineering culture is... odd. They hire senior people and then let them all fuck sound aimlessly. Their APIs are terrible, their infrastructure is all over the place, they still have patch Tuesdays. But because they are the landlord that owns every house in town, what are you going to do, not pay rent?
Gabe is out there cruising the world in a billion dollar yacht, eating thousand dollar meals. All that came off the backs of developers who actually make the games.
> It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.
This is true, but "treat their customers ok" goes a long way. When everybody else severely abuses their customers, the one company that doesn't generates a lot of goodwill.
Eh, Steam is kind of like the liberal democratic US empire. It may be evil in a lot of ways but it could actually be a LOT worse. We may actually historically be very lucky to have had a non-shittificationmaxxing games platform for a couple decades, just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country.. Enjoy both while they last, may not be around long.
I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee
Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games
And yet. Steam persists
Totally agreed. I'm building a Steam competitor, that's web-based (WebGPU/WASM) as well as cross-platform. Light on games atm, but the goal is to replicate over time virtually every feature Steam has to offer, as well as more. You can check out a preview of the portal here:
https://gameselect-knvxf8av.manus.space/